Wizards from Oz

A wave of brilliant Australians came to Britain sixty years ago. They included Clive James, Germaine Greer – and Barry Humphries

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‘We're going overseas,’ announced Ada Scott, my mother’s friend. ‘After that, we might pop over to some of the clean countries.’

By ‘overseas’, Ada meant what we all meant: England. My grandparents called it ‘going home’ and, in the Melbourne of that epoch, it was an inevitable destination, to which we swam like spawning salmon.

The ‘clean countries’ were nowhere near the Mediterranean, of course, and were probably places like Denmark, Holland and Switzerland. Dorothy Wilmot, my mother’s dressmaker, said that she had found Sweden ‘spotless’, and the Swedes – just like the Wilmots – ‘very particular’.

Before I boarded an Italian ship in Melbourne bound for the Old Country, in 1959, I had a romantic view of my destination. In my early years, my picture of England was inspired by all those books from Odhams Press with titles like Lovely Britain and Wonderful Britain.

There was a whole shelfful of these illustrated volumes published during the Second World War to encourage patriotism, especially in the far reaches of the Empire where we lived.

We were totally deprived of the thing that England had in such abundance and which Hitler threatened: quaintness. The only thatched cottage we could cherish was our magnificent Staffordshire thatched-cottage teapot, and matching cup and saucer, which, after becoming slightly chipped, ended up in the gardener’s shed.

We could remotely assert our allegiance to Albion with a Winston Churchill calendar behind the kitchen door, and an Edward VIII souvenir Coronation mug – brought back on the boat by my grandparents who were due to attend that ill-starred event – but we were quaintness-starved.